Creatures That Once Were Men

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Book Excerpt

act
between a simplicity, which we in the West feel to be very old,
and a rebelliousness which we in the West feel to he very new.
We cannot in our graduated and polite civilization quite make head
or tail of the Russian anarch; we can only feel in a vague way
that his tale is the tale of the Missing Link, and that his head
is the head of the superman. We hear his lonely cry of anger.
But we cannot be quite certain whether his protest is the protest
of the first anarchist against government, or whether it
is the protest of the last savage against civilization.
The cruelty of ages and of political cynicism or necessity has
done much to burden the race of which Gorky writes; but time
has left them one thing which it has not left to the people
in Poplar or West Ham.

It has left them, apparently, the clear and childlike power
of seeing the cruelty which encompasses them. Gorky is a tramp,
a man of the people, and also a critic, and a bitter one.
In the West poor men, when they become articulate in literature